Deeply Ingrained
by BarbedWire
Summary: AU universe in which the city is reset, and the factions resumed. Tobias returns to Dauntless without his memories, embracing his bad habits once more. But some memories, and fears are too deeply ingrained to be truly forgotten.


**Author's Note: Hi! I have never written AU before, but I made the mistake of reading Allegiant in the week before I attempt an original story for National Novel Writing Month, and I had to get all my feelings for it out before that so I can focus on my other writing. Not that this is any happier than the ending of Allegiant, but you know. In this AU Tobias and the rest of the city is reset and the factions resumed. Tobias has gone back to beign Dauntless. And obsessive. And masochistic. Basically, he's Four completely. I am unsure as to the official status of Tris.  
Sometime after November this may be developed into a full length multi chaptered AU story. But I also might totally swear off writing after November. Who knows. I'll add more if I decide to continue. I do not own Divergent. Reviews are awesome.**

There is a girl in my fear landscape. She is small, slight and blonde and not more than 17. I have no idea who she is, but even without knowing the letters and sounds to assign to her I know that she terrifies me.

In Dauntless we use the fear landscape mostly for initiations- we learn to best our fears and then move on, knowing exactly what it is we are afraid of and that we can conquer it. Those who cannot are not accepted. It is simple, logical, the way we have always done things.

But I have become obsessed with it, begun walking back to the room at all hours of the day.

This is not the way I have always done things. At least, it is not how I remember always doing things and somehow my mind thinks that is an important distinction.

The feel of the needle sliding into my neck is familiar, though that is probably only because I have done this near a thousand times that I can recall.

The wind swirls around me, and I close my eyes, knowing how far I have to fall. I imagine the glass and metal giving way underneath my feet, the scream no one would hear as I surrendered my last breaths and the way my body would crumple at the bottom. I am afraid of it, scared of the distance between me and the ground but this fear does not consume me. I breathe slowly, focusing on the solidity of the roof beneath my feet.

My heart rate slows and the wind vanishes. The surface beneath me, that had moments ago been my comfort changes; contorting sickly until it becomes a box around my entire body. I am trapped, forced into a sitting position in the complete darkness.

My breaths lose their steadiness, and my heart pulses in my chest. I can almost feel the box tightening on me; closing me in tighter and tighter until the pressure forces my brain to run out my ears. My hands go numb and the panic finally sets in as I feel a ghost of a thought tugging fleetingly at my mind. In it I imagine if someone were in the box with me, pressing my hand to their heart to give me something to focus on. It feels like a memory, but it doesn't match with anything else I can remember.

I don't know why it makes me more afraid, but it does and I burrow deeper into the box, willing it to finish me off already.

"Tobias," I hear the voice before the walls of the box actually vanish.

I look up frantically, feeling that any separation between me and the voice is unbearable.

The girl tries to smile at me, to show me she is happy to see me, but something is wrong. My eyes are locked to hers, and I am terrified of what will happen if I look away.

I start to move toward her, finding as I do so that the box has melted around my ankles and reformed, locking me into place. Frantically I pull against. I have to get to her. I have to touch the strange girl.

"Tobias please," she says and as she speaks a red puddle forms around her feet. Impossibly red. Impossibly dark.

I will my feet to fall free from my legs so that I can crawl to her, help her somehow. She cannot die. I know instinctively, even without any inkling of who she is that if she dies so will I.

I push and pull and scream senselessly against the metal confines like a wild animal, senseless to the logic of the situation.

The girl says nothing more, but she begins to slump, the pool growing around her so that it almost touches me and tears fall from her eyes. They flow down her cheeks, running the length of her neck in swift channels over the pattern of three dark birds taking flight on her shoulder.

I need to save her, there cannot be a choice in that matter. But the nameless girl is fading, the grey of her clothes obscured almost entirely by blood and I have not moved my feet even a bit.

Even so the fear goes on for what feels like hours. The girl continues to sob and die quietly, her warm blood moving out before her so that when I lunge and try to reach her I fall in it. It is sickly warm, filled with the life that is leaving her.

"Tobias," she breathes through her sobs and I scream because I cannot help her. In the back of my mind something stirs, like the thought of the heartbeat in the box, an odd memory-like thought. Perhaps it was a dream at one point.

I imagine the same voice, saying my name but instead of pleading she is sighing, breathing it almost soundlessly against my skin.

I look up at her, knowing there must be some way that I can stop this, but she is fading.

Not just dying, she has been doing that the whole time, but literally vanishing. Her blood, which moments ago covered my arm and half my torso in sticky wetness is gone, the entire puddled dried up without a trace. She does not look troubled anymore, there are no tears in her now translucent face and she manages a smile at me. The binds at my feet are gone, and I struggle into a standing position and bolt toward her.

When I reach her, she is little more than a shadow. I know that I have the power to call her back, that if I can open my mouth and shout her name she will return to me. I wrap my fingers around her disintegrating shoulder and search my mind for the memory of this girl, for just what I should be calling. But I can't. I look at her and I know I should know who she is, I should be able to stop her evaporation but I do not know her name. I don't know a single sound of it. Desperate I think faster, more hurried but nothing comes up and in a moment she is gone. I fall to the ground, breathing hard.

She could still return, I know because I am still in the simulation. I have not completed this fear. But no matter how long I sit here I will not remember her name.

After some immeasurable amount of time I give up, lying over on my side and giving my body over to the great sobs that shake it.

Every time I watch the slim girl bleed slowly out I think there cannot possibly be anything I fear worse than watching her die and being unable to help.

But inevitably she then starts to fade, disappearing like smoke. I realize, every time I complete my fear landscape that the thing I am most afraid of is forgetting her- that she will be gone, not just from the world but from my mind.

It is incredibly irrational, how can I forget someone I have never known? I wracked my brain for hours after I first saw her here to conclude what she represented. I could not come up with anything other than what she was- a young Abnegation girl with Dauntless tattoos who I am terrified to lose.

I don't know who she is. If she is someone I really have lost or a figment of my imagination. I don't know why losing her is so frightening, or why I could have been induced to forget her. I only know that she is my greatest fear, and that impossible though it is, some part of me misses her more than anything.


End file.
